This conference brings together scholars, curators, filmmakers, writers, and post-graduate students from Latin America and the Caribbean, the United States, Europe, and the UK. It stems from the ongoing collaboration between members of staff from the programmes of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, UK and the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.

The processes we associate with contemporary forms of ‘globalization’ have – be they economic, political or cultural –spawned a variety of re-worldings that, via a number of transdisciplinary formations, have reconfigured the humanities, including Hispanism and Latin-Americanism, Cultural Studies, Postmodernism, Post-colonialism and even Post-structuralism being the most well-known. After the financial crisis, new (and not so new) trans, de-, and/or non-national or regional objects, subjects and assemblages are coming to the fore, redrawing and digitalizing established frontiers and differences as well as re-defining the politics of culture and its study. Before our very eyes, the transversal routes of migration world-wide are breaking down established frontiers, both in the old metropoli and in the so-called peripheries, at whose sites new cultural and political subjects are emerging. In the light of this global expansion of neoliberalism and new forms of governmentality, as well as the histories globalization brings into view, what are the concerns that are or should define the research agenda of a newly globalized Hispanism? In this conference, we revisit Luso-Hispanic and Latin@-American geographies, and reconsider the subjectivities emerging out of the above mentioned processes, in their varying conditions and trajectories, and also by way of the items in the material culture that conspire in their fashioning.

This conference is generously supported by The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (BIH) and the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS), both at Birkbeck, University of London. The Instituto Cervantes has also provided support for this event. In collaboration with Canning House and the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS), a conversation between Ticio Escobar and John Kraniauskas will be hosted on Thursday 23 November 2017. Further information TBA.

Spell Reel is the result of a multifaceted research and digitisation project that she initiated in 2011 with Sana na N’Hada and Flora Gomes. Having studied film in Cuba, the two began using the camera to observe the fight for independence in Guinea-Bissau (1963–74). After the decaying visual and audio material was digitised in Berlin, the filmmakers travelled with a mobile cinema to the places where the footage had originally been shot and showed it to audiences for the first time, adding their own commentary. They then moved on, also returning to Berlin. Spell Reel watches an archive at work to produce the present.

This conference brings together scholars, curators, filmmakers, writers, and post-graduate students from Latin America and the Caribbean, the United States, Europe, and the UK. It stems from the ongoing collaboration between members of staff from the programmes of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, UK and the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.

The processes we associate with contemporary forms of ‘globalization’ have – be they economic, political or cultural –spawned a variety of re-worldings that, via a number of transdisciplinary formations, have reconfigured the humanities, including Hispanism and Latin-Americanism, Cultural Studies, Postmodernism, Post-colonialism and even Post-structuralism being the most well-known. After the financial crisis, new (and not so new) trans, de-, and/or non-national or regional objects, subjects and assemblages are coming to the fore, redrawing and digitalizing established frontiers and differences as well as re-defining the politics of culture and its study. Before our very eyes, the transversal routes of migration world-wide are breaking down established frontiers, both in the old metropoli and in the so-called peripheries, at whose sites new cultural and political subjects are emerging. In the light of this global expansion of neoliberalism and new forms of governmentality, as well as the histories globalization brings into view, what are the concerns that are or should define the research agenda of a newly globalized Hispanism? In this conference, we revisit Luso-Hispanic and Latin@-American geographies, and reconsider the subjectivities emerging out of the above mentioned processes, in their varying conditions and trajectories, and also by way of the items in the material culture that conspire in their fashioning.

This conference is generously supported by The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (BIH) and the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS), both at Birkbeck, University of London. The Instituto Cervantes has also provided support for this event. In collaboration with Canning House and the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS), a conversation between Ticio Escobar and John Kraniauskas will be hosted on Thursday 23 November 2017. Further information TBA.

Spell Reel is the result of a multifaceted research and digitisation project that she initiated in 2011 with Sana na N’Hada and Flora Gomes. Having studied film in Cuba, the two began using the camera to observe the fight for independence in Guinea-Bissau (1963–74). After the decaying visual and audio material was digitised in Berlin, the filmmakers travelled with a mobile cinema to the places where the footage had originally been shot and showed it to audiences for the first time, adding their own commentary. They then moved on, also returning to Berlin. Spell Reel watches an archive at work to produce the present.